Sunday, February 19, 2012

I am exhausted but have a grin across my face only the Joker could top. For the last few years I have been working on a makeshift desk, cunningly crafted from my student drawing board layed upon two filing cabinets with blue tac to act as a cushion. The cabinets gave me no leg room, so I worked with a twisted back, and the drawing table itself had sharp metal ridges that gathered particles of epoxy, wire and epoxy and lead filings. Not very healthy.
Kate and I decided to throw out the cabinets, shifting everything into storage boxes and buy me a proper desk... and boy, its a thing of beauty.

Dave now makes stuff here!

I now have leg room, a dust free working space and finally room to work on a few scenic items and have a few to one side drying. I am just so incredibly happy to finally have a dedicated space. Bless Ikea. Creative energy flows around the room on the gentle breeze that bloweth on my straightened knees!

It took six hours of hard work to clean out the study, refile everything into 24 interlocking plastic storage tubs and make room for the desk, as I blog this (and drink that coffee there), Kate is still busy refiling her paperwork into a storage folder. The house is chaos! Once she is done I will take over to do mine. It is staggering how much crap can build up in a room if you let it. The final joy is going to be dragging the grey, sombre, tin filing cabinets out to the road to be picked up by the council waste truck. Begone foul soul sucking, knee cramping fiends!

One of the fun things I did today with the project was go through every one of my sketch books and remove any miniature designs, placing them into plastic flip folders for easy access. I had about fifty sketch books, so it took most of the day to do. I ended up with two A4 folders full of designs, which reportedly hold around 250 pages- giving 1000 a4 pages all up, with an average of 5 figure doodles on each page. Thats well over 5000 miniature sketches. That should keep me busy for a while. :)

The first thing onto my desk was one of my new Dwerg Burrowguard troops and an Arcane Asgard Creature of Chaos Elephant Man to match the one that appears in Aly Morrisons 'Eavy Metal article in White Dwarf 80.

Colors matches in real life, but the photo changes it quite a bit. As you can see, the two figures vary.. For starters, the weapon is cast lower down and has bandages wrapped around, I suspect to avoid breakages. I am not sure if the original had a seperate weapon- which some of the Asgard figures do (never a good idea in my book), or if Aly converted it. If anyone has an original I would be pleased to find out (and buy one).

Mine came from Viking forge, who have most of the Asgard molds. I found quite a few little variations. The model is surprisingly small, and seems to have warped quote a bit over its very long life. The face is longer, the eye flatter, the trunk thinner near the bend, the shield rougher on the inside, the whole body feels squished horizontally and the front leg is about half as thick as it is wide. Weather this is a casting issue or the original sculpt was poorly proportioned, its hard to say. I was so delighted that this figure was still available that I grabbed two.
Mine has a belt and a roughly torn kilt, but Alys appears beltless and smooth all the way to the hip. I suspect he has filled it with milliput to allow for decoration, as he definately did with the Skaven Plague monk from the same article. I filled mine with liquid green stuff, just to check out how it performed really. Not as good as milliput but more convenient.

The White Dwarf 80 article has long fascinated me, and I have been eagerly collecting all the figures it showcases. You may remember the copy I made of his Skaven plague lord from the same article. I have most of the figures now, and trying to work out what bits are what for the converted models. I would love to have a showcase featuring them all.

Well, I am now going to take my new found creative energies and put them into finishing off some more sculpts. Have fun.

Wednesday, February 15, 2012

Sorry in advance, but I will be getting a little bit commercial for this episode. Hopefully by the time you finish reading this entry you will forgive me, as it is totally about rocking the retro.
First I am just going to whip out something that came in the mail from the land of Ebay a couple of weeks ago.

Citadel Monster Paint Set

Ahh. That's right folks, it's the Monster Paint Set from the 1980's. Check out that lovely painting by Bob Naismith on the cover! Thats what the Golden Demon looked like in the 80s, by the way... before he got all crusty and angry. I remember that fateful day when I discovered a department store in Southend stocked miniatures. I walked away with a snotling pump wagon (never assembled), spikey bondage minotaur lord, chaos sorcerers, a giant scorpion, the monster starter set, creature and monster paint sets. That night I dunked my snotlings in a thick layer of green paint. It had begun!

Mmmm... Still fresh!

I was surprised to find the paints where still in great shape; though unfortunately not the original colors that are supposed to be in the box, but I knew that when I bid. I was more concerned about getting the box to be honest and perhaps having a sniff of the paints! It holds great nostalgia for me. What a great day that was back in the 80's!

Okay, now the commercial bit.

Remember I was ranting about the orange when I painted the Chaos Sorcerer? The next picture shows an original 1980s citadel pot next to the modern Coat D'arms paint. See? How awesome is that?

Citadel original Orange next to Modern Coat D'arms orange

So that brings me to my big news...

There is a new stockist in Australia for Coat D'arms paints!

Me.

That's right. I love the paints so much I decided to import them.

In a couple of weeks you will be able to get your hands on the entire Coat D'arms Fantasy Range direct from my new sleek, sexy, easy to use e-commerce site. Retroliciousness in a few clicks!
Yep, all 77 clasic colors in those fat, perky little 18ml pots. You can forget the dark days paying 8 Australian Dollars for a measley 12ml.

I will also be stocking decent, sturdy empty dropper bottles for those of you who, like me, prefer squirting to dunking. Switching your entire collection of paints over to droppers will be really affordable now. I am excited. You excited?

Anyway, here is more paint pron.

Mmmm. Paint.

Okay, commercial over. And hey, I vaguely promise to not drag on and on about these paints in future articles. Heres the gist. They rock.

So next episode I will be back to showing off more retro stuff. Painting the Skulldred contributor minis has taken up a lot of my painting time allotment but rest assured, there is old lead begging to be painted and blogged.